WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet?Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
2
('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sand and pines,Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com'st to me,As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.)
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Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sun- der'd,A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught;Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought.
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No further does she say, but lingering all the day,Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by.
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What is it, fateful woman—so blear, hardly human?Why wag your head, with turban bound—yellow, red and green?Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?